Zemni Photography Blog

Photography projects, inspiration and research by Linda Mayoux

Joan Fontcuberta

Category: To Do

  • Joan Fontcuberta

    Joan Fontcuberta co-opts all forms of media and public communication. In essence, he creates modern-day Trojan-horse-type bodies of work and presents them, deadpan, in scholarly journals, hard-bound “scientific” books, large-scale legitimate museum exhibitions, and as newsworthy “discoveries” that fool even the most professional of experts, journalists, and their readers.
    He produced a number of series:

    • Miracles & Co. (documenting the miraculous powers of a
      secluded religious sect);
    • Orogenesis (which “tricks” military satellite terrain-imaging software to create images derived from paintings and photographs rather than satellite imagery);
    • Herbarium and Fauna (botanical and biological findings of previously undiscovered bizarre plants and animals);
      Sputnik (mythical story of a Russian cosmonaut who is still lost in space),
    • Pin Zhuang (when a US spy plane crashed in China, the Chinese re-assembled the pieces into a variety of working spacecraft);
      Hemograms (exploring identity through blood and its self-expression as abstract art);
    • A series of photomosaics using photo-imaging freeware and Google’s image search engine to re-create popular media images (as usual, the supporting text often contains the “real” message).

    He is the author/creator of more than 20 books, including The Artist and the Photograph, which “proves” that Picasso, Dali, Miro and other famous painters actually used photographs as the original source material for some of their greatest masterpieces. That work created a real shock and backlash from the art world, because so many people believed it was true. (Serious museums joined in the joke and presented the “original” photos side by side with the actual paintings, and even experts in their fields got duped — and then angry). His latest book, “Landscapes without Memory”, is published by Aperture.

    Joan Fontcuberta

  • Thomas Demand

    Thomas Demand, (born 1964 in Munich, Germany) is a German sculptor and photographer. He currently lives and works in Berlin and Los Angeles, and teaches at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg.

    He invites us to question the reality of what we are looking at—not just in his photographs, but in everyday life as well. At first glance, his images appear to be photographic records of “real” and oddly familiar places. Then the viewer realises that they are looking at something entirely artificial. It is this sudden realisation that something so apparently real that gives Demand’s work its undeniable psychological impact

    His art-making process begins with selecting photographic images from the mass media, often of rooms or spaces that are politically or historically charged (for example, the kitchen in Saddam Hussein’s hideaway in Tikrit, Iraq).

    Trained as a sculptor, Demand then creates life-size replicas of the chosen image using colored paper and cardboard. But he strips his creations of the detail, frames of reference (and of any people) that would create a specific context; Saddam’s kitchen, for instance, could be almost anyone’s.

     

    The next step is to photograph the tableaux.

     

    Then, finally, he destroys his constructions.

     

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  • Exhibiting documentary photography

    Exhibiting your images
    In many cases of social documentary the natural vehicle to bring the work to the public is
    exhibition followed by or simultaneous with a book. There are a number of issues to be resolved:
    • Who will stage the exhibition?
    • Where will it be seen?
    • Who will it be seen by?
    The work itself will have been based around some decisions made before the shoot took place.
    There must be a context and there will be a relationship between the subject and context that
    you will explore. This may influence format and quality which may in turn impact on the nature
    of the equipment involved. If your images are made using a mobile phone then you’re unlikely
    to get A1 reproduction.
    The aesthetic supporting the work may justify a departure from conventional sharp prints or
    solid colour. It may be that the exhibited prints are from a professional level piece of equipment
    and yet are printed postcard-sized – again an aesthetic consideration of the photographer.
    All of these factors will support the condition of the work relative to the reality that you as
    photographer want to convey. Your work may be seen as part of an installation where the viewer
    becomes part of the experience. It may be placed exclusively online as a media-based piece. The
    book may be interactive or stand separately from the exhibition. You’ll need to look at the cost
    of bringing the work to the market – the viewers that are its intended destination – before the
    project starts.

  • Can documentary photography make a difference? How?

    This discusses non-profit – the future of the photographer/author and the delivery of images
    rights-free to give voice to a cause. Is there a connection to be made with the work of Riis and
    Hine in the first half of the twentieth century? Can a documentary photographer really make a
    difference?

  • Clare Hewitt

    Clare Hewitt is a Photographer based in Birmingham, a Senior Lecturer in Photography at The University of the West of England, Bristol, and Archivist for Vanley Burke with Art360 Foundation and The Feeney Archive Project.

    After completing a degree in Law at Oxford Brookes University, she went on to study Commercial Photography at the Arts University Bournemouth.

    Everything in the Forest is the Forest

    https://clarehewitt.co.uk/everything-in-the-forest-is-the-forest/#0

    Clare’s practice often focusses on ideas relating to loneliness, isolation and collaboration. In Everything in the forest is the forest, she has worked with a community of 12 oak trees to visually understand how they thrive through connection and communication, to inspire similar behaviour amongst human beings. Everything in the forest is theforest was selected to be exhibited at Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden, in September 2022.

    EVERYTHING IN THE FOREST IS THE FOREST

    Clare Hewitt was awarded a GRAIN Bursary in 2019 to support the development of Everything In The Forest Is The Forest, with particular focus upon the making of work in the woodland and developing the work as a collaborative project.   Clare began to look at the affects of isolation through working with a community of individuals and a woodland of oak trees.

    As well as developing 24 pinhole cameras, supported by STEAMHouse, which were located high in the oak trees in the form of bird boxes, Clare also developed methodologies to make work utilising the forest floor and the roots of trees.

    The pinhole cameras and the other various approaches were ongoing for more than 12 months.

    Although trees appear to be individual organisms above ground, scientific research shows that their complex communication methods facilitate survival, nurture and pass on wisdom, and send warnings when they are under attack. In a time when loneliness is increasing, segregation is being encouraged politically, and isolation driven through technology, there is much that can be learnt from the unity of the forest.

    Clare is now working towards a major show of the work that will tour nationally.

    Other work

    In her work in progress, Kamera, Clare exchanges letters with a prisoner on death row in Kentucky, including a landscape photograph with each letter sent. The images become part of his cell walls, and he responds with letters, stories, drawings and occasional photographs.

    Clare’s work has been selected for awards including Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward, the British Journal of Photography’s Portrait of Britain, the Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition, and inclusion in the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize exhibition. She was the recipient of the GRAIN Bursary Award 2019, and received a special mention in Krakow Photomonth’s ShowOFF 2022.  Her work has also been exhibited at The Palace of Westminster, Midlands Arts Centre, The Royal Albert Hall, The Royal Photographic Society and Library of Birmingham.

    Clare Hewitt is a photographer based in Birmingham.   In 2011 she was selected for Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed at The Photographers’ Gallery, and has since been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery as part of the Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize, 2013. In 2016 and 2017 she was included in the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward emerging photographer selection for Eugenie and Kamera, and the British Journal of Photography’s nationwide Portrait of Britain exhibition. Clare has been shortlisted for the Royal Photographic Society’s IPE #161, and selected for 209 Women, a photographic portrait project that marks the centenary of women achieving the vote in the UK in 1918.

  • Awoiska van der molen

    Awoiska van der Molen (born 1972) is a Dutch photographer, living in Amsterdam. Between 2000 and 2003, van der Molen made portraits of charismatic women she met on the streets of Manhattan, later switching to people judged by different criteria. After that she turned to photographing anonymous buildings at the edge of the city. Since 2009, she has concentrated on the natural world, travelling alone to remote places in order to make the work. She makes black and white prints in her own darkroom. 

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molens photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing; expressing these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

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    She has produced three books of black and white landscape photographs, made in remote places:

    Sequester (2014) “photographed throughout the whole of Europe” including the volcanic Canary Islands,contains monochromatic “landscapes, at times abstractly rendered to the point of dissolving into abstractions [. . . ] often obliterating all sense of the physical scale that was in front of the camera, many of them using very narrow ranges of tonality, from the blackest black to maybe a dark grey”.

    Photography exists by the virtue of light, but the landscapes in Awoiska van der Molen’s photographs loom out of the darkness. Her monochrome photographic works arise out of a desire to penetrate deeply into the core of the isolated world in which she photographs. Awoiska van der Molen is known for her monochrome landscapes. She stands out as someone who remains rooted in the riches of analogue photography and printing. She plays out these roots in an extreme manner by creating monumental pieces that combine intentionality in choice of subject and photographic craftsmanship.

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books#sequester

    Blanco 

    (2017) contains photographs of desolate landscapes and trees.

    “Spending long periods of time in solitude in remote landscapes, Awoiska van der Molen slowly uncovers the identity of the place, allowing it to impress upon her its specific emotional and physical qualities. Using her personal experience within the landscape for her creative process, she instinctively searches for a state of being in which the boundary between herself and her surroundings blur”.  

    Anna Dannemann, The Photographers’ Gallery | Deutsche Borse Photography Foundation Prize 2017.

    The Living Mountain 

    (2020) is “a book about land, solitude and the planet we inhabit.”

    ‘Regardless of how personal the starting point of my work may be, in the end I hope my images touch the strings of a universal knowledge, something lodged in our bodies, our guts, an intuition that reminds us of where we came from ages ago. A memory of our core existence, our bedrock, unyielding certainty in a very precarious world’. 

    https://www.awoiska.nl/books

  • Mat Collishaw

    https://matcollishaw.com/works

  • Sanne de Wilde

    http://sannedewilde.com/

    Part 2: ‘The Island of the Colorblind’ was turned into an immersive painting-installation that is meant to make the viewer experience what it is like to be/paint colorblind. The installation takes the idea of cooperatively creating content with subject and viewer another step further. The space the viewer enters, consists of four walls covered in 4 infrared wallpapers, picturing the Micronesian island, on the inside. On the outside it is a ‘work in progress’ that grows as participants pin the painting they made on the wall outside when leaving the space. Visitors entering the room are invited to sit down. On the table in front of them they find a set of headphones, paint, water and brushes and printed pictures. As they put on the headphones a voice guides them through the painting-process while telling them the story of the colorblind community on the island Pingelap. The text of the audio used in “The Island of the Colorblind -painting installation’’ is based on the mythical story of how the islanders believe colorblindness came to the island and is mixed with quotes and questions that came up during the painting sessions with the achromats.

  • Natasha Myers

    Natasha Myers is Associate Professor of Anthropology at York University.

    She convened the Plant Studies Collaboratory in 2010 to serve as a node for collaborative interdisciplinary research on plant-based ecologies and economies. 

    Her first book, Rendering Life Molecular: Models, Modelers, and Excitable Matter (Duke 2015) is an ethnography of an interdisciplinary group of scientists who make living substance come to matter at the molecular scale. This book maps protein modeling techniques in the context of the ongoing molecularization of life in the biosciences. It explores how protein modelers’ multidimensional data forms are shifting the cusp of visibility, the contours of the biological imagination, and the nature of living substance. What, it asks, does life become in their hands?

    Becoming Sensor in Sentient Worlds

     I like to think of art practices as forms of dissensus that can rearrange our sensoria and sense making. I think about disrupting the intention of the camera, the logic of the grid in ecology, and producing data forms that cannot be arrayed along a chart or graph, that resist quantitative analysis. Becoming Sensor is about disrupting modes of attention and forms of knowing about the more-than-human that are so entrenched in settler common sense. It’s a kind of de-schooling, an unlearning, which can help us forget everything that we thought we knew about “nature.”

    Plants also provoke rethinking the senses, sensing, and sense making. People tend to think plants can’t communicate because they have no eyes, ears, or mouths. We wanted to render our bodies available to sensing plant sentience, sensing what plants are up to, how they move and grow, and tune into their sensibilities and gestures.

    https://culanth.org/fieldsights/becoming-sensor-an-interview-with-natasha-myers

    Becoming Sensor is about disrupting modes of attention and forms of knowing about the more-than-human that are so entrenched in settler common sense. It’s a kind of de-schooling, an unlearning, which can help us forget everything that we thought we knew about “nature.”

    EVANS, Meredith. 2020. “Becoming Sensor in the Planthroposcene: An Interview with Natasha Myers.

    Art in the Planthroposcene: Refuse the aesthetics of ruin porn, which constrains our imaginaries about plants expressing their powers to sites of cultural decay and times of human extinction. Cultivate, instead, a taste for Planthroposcene porn: art that keeps people in the game by staging intimate relations among plants and people. MYERS, Natasha. October 2018 p.9.

    Becoming Sensor aims to make strange the ways that the conventional ecological sciences have not only been deployed to colonize land, but also to colonize our imaginations; how they evacuate all other ways of knowing the living world, most especially those local and Indigenous knowledges that are attuned to the sentience of lands and bodies.

    https://becomingsensor.com

    Contact

    website: https://natashamyers.wordpress.com

    Contact

  • Stephen Gill

    Overview

    https://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio/nggallery/album-1-2/Night-Procession/thumbnails

    “Stephen Gill has learnt this: to haunt the places that haunt him. His photo-accumulations demonstrate a tender vision factored out of experience; alert, watchful, not overeager, wary of that mendacious conceit, ‘closure’. There is always flow, momentum, the sense of a man passing through a place that delights him. A sense of stepping down, immediate engagement, politic exchange. Then he remounts the bicycle and away. Loving retrievals, like a letter to a friend, never possession… What I like about Stephen Gill is that he has learnt to give us only as much as we need, the bones of the bones of the bones…”

    Iain Sinclair

    Stephen Gill (b. 1971, Bristol, UK) became interested in photography in his early childhood, thanks to his father and interest in insects and initial obsession with collecting bits of pond life to inspect under his microscope.

    https://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio/nggallery/album-1-2/Night-Procession/thumbnails

    Please Notify the Sun

    https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=147976830509294

    https://www.stephengill.co.uk/portfolio/portfolio/nggallery/album/please-notify-the-sun/thumbnails

    night procession

    Ghostly images of animals caught in trailcam footage.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/night-procession-portfolio

    Birds

    Photographs of single birds in everyday locations. The birds themselves are photographed very small, so the viewer has to search through the images of urban decay to find them.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/birds-portfolio

    The Pillar

    Birds taking off, and flying around a post in a field.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/the-pillar-portfolio

    Pigeons

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/pigeon-portfolio

    Abstract

    Photographs of light filtered through colourful gloops and textures, apparently of decaying substances.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/please-notify-the-sun-portfolio

    A series of disappointments

    Scrumpled newspaper looking like animals and figures.

    https://www.nobodybooks.com/product/a-series-of-disappointments-portfolio